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When Vermont Railway engineer Sean Harper and conductor Seth Rowell offered up this railroad maxim, they weren’t being dramatic. They were simply sharing the reality that undergirds the methodical repetition of procedures that marks every action they take.

The Chronicle was recently invited to ride along with a railroad crew from Vermont Railway to learn a little about this transportation corridor that runs through the heart of Orleans County. This reporter met with the crew on Friday at the Newport switchyard and eventually traveled south to its Lyndonville transload facility.

“I don’t like to think of it as a dangerous job,” Mr. Harper said.

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BARTON — Chittenden County developer Tony Pomerleau has given St. Paul’s School here a very big birthday gift.

He will match every dollar the school raises up to $120,000.

This year the school turns 120. The class that started school this fall is the one hundred-twentieth entering the parish school; the one that will graduate in the spring will be the one hundred twentieth to graduate.

Mr. Pomerleau heard about the anniversary and wanted to do something special because he has connections to both Barton and Catholic schools, said St. Paul’s Principal Joanne Beloin. She said that Mr. Pomerleau is a regular donor to the school, but she certainly never expected a gift of this magnitude.

“He challenged us with such a generous match,” she said on Tuesday. “We did not expect that at all.”

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BARTON — The select board here unanimously voted Monday to allow members of an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) group to use a two-mile stretch of Barton roads starting in the spring.

That will give the town time to adopt an ordinance to cover what select board member Jody Frey called “the procedural stuff” — speed limits and the like.

“I see it as a win-win,” select board Chair Bob Croteau said before the vote. “This is a small amount of road and a well thought out plan. I think it’s very reasonable.”

About seven members of the Borderline Ridge Riders came to the select board’s meeting in hopes of getting permission to ride on a half-mile stretch of the East Albany Road and a mile-and-a-half stretch of the Stevens Road that runs between existing trails in Albany and Glover.

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The man who was the cause of a heavily armed police presence in Barton Village Monday pled innocent in the Criminal Division of Superior Court in Newport Tuesday to a felony count of unlawful trespass, plus a charge of reckless endangerment and another of aggravated disorderly conduct.

Max Pickel, 30, who police say was from Orleans but is currently homeless, was held for lack of $2,500 cash bail.

About 11:30 a.m. Monday State Police received a call from the Circle K, which is bordered by Main Street and Lincoln Avenue, saying that a man was “hollering threats to kill people and shooting a gun,” says an affidavit written by State Police Trooper Debra Munson.

Police arrived in force. They included officers from the State Police, the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department, and the Border Patrol. A helicopter was called in and circled above the village, focusing on the Lincoln Avenue and High Street area.

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Galvanized, New and Selected Poems by Leland Kinsey. Published by Green Writers Press, Brattleboro. 381 pages. $24.95 in paperback.

Reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

As its subtitle suggests, Barton poet Lee Kinsey’s new book is a double offering. It begins with a dozen new poems; then a rich selection of his finest work drawn from earlier books that stretch all the way from Northern Almanac (1991) through Family Drives (1993), Not One Man’s Work (1996), Sledding on Hospital Hill (2003), and TheImmigrant’s Contract (2008), to Winter Ready (2014).

Galvanized is a double offering in another sense, as well. To readers who know anything of this area and its history it is a beautifully drafted, richly detailed, four-dimensional map through space and time.

But Mr. Kinsey also takes his readers to the wilds of Labrador, the relentless heat of Africa, the wheat fields and dinosaur-rich badlands of western Canada, and the bars of Havana long before Castro tamed them.

Except for the latter, from which Mr. Kinsey was barred by U.S. law, these are first-person accounts of the poet’s travels. He was toured through Tanzania by a cousin, Erwin Kinsey, who has made agricultural development there his life’s work. And in one of the new poems, “Shouldered,” it is good to see that, even removed from the Northeast Kingdom by a generation and the Atlantic Ocean, the Kinsey spirit survives.

Trying to be helpful, Erwin’s three pre-teen boys roll a large boulder out of a steep, sandy road. The huge rock doesn’t come quietly to rest on the shoulder, but rolls through a coffee plantation, a fence, a garden, a small dam, and two shops before coming to rest against their school.

The poet reports:

The day they told me of it

we walked and talked down every thrashed,

apologized for, paid for, proud inch.

Proud, indeed. Another story for the Kinsey family annals.

When he combined the stories he’d collected from an elderly friend into The Immigrant’s Contract, Mr. Kinsey felt obliged to visit Alberta. His friend had gone out west on a train to help bust the prairie sod, driving one of five ten-horse teams across a perfectly flat landscape.

Mr. Kinsey made the long drive in three days, sticking as close to the railway line as he could.

In the poem “Alberta Wheat Fields” his protagonist, who emigrated to the Kingdom from Quebec as a young man, notices something missing:

I waited for ledges and rocks but the disks

wheeled on, cutting for hour after stoneless hour.

In another of his new poems, “Fish Eggs,” Mr. Kinsey is in Labrador. He’s set aside the eggs he stripped from a catch as a gift for the expedition’s cook. But they don’t make it back to camp. The poem closes with a fine demonstration of Mr. Kinsey’s gift for rhythm:

Eggs, and no gull noticed,

gull, and no eggs to be seen,

no one’s rights involved,

just, quick as that,

life’s magic

act.

But it is the work that emerges from the poet’s precise map of the neighborhood that this reader finds most compelling.

It is intimate stuff, but in detail, Mr. Kinsey warns us in “Horseshoeing,” we must grant him some measure of poetic license:

But any path to or through

the past is an icy road,

whatever the pace,

distorted by speed.

Some of the incidents in his poems are completely accurate, Mr. Kinsey said Saturday in an interview. “Others I manipulated. I’m not trying to write my autobiography. I’m trying to write poems.”

In background detail, however, the poems ring perfectly true. From “Children Sledding on Hospital Hill” he evokes:

… an icy night

so cold the roads weren’t slippery.

And from “Upland Birds,” the grouse’s perfect imitation of machine:

All day I heard the muffled thumps

like the tumble and thuds

of my grandfather starting

his old John Deere tractor

There are surprising similes that could only occur to a writer who grew up on a rock-cursed dairy farm in the Kingdom. From “Swing,” catching fastballs hurled by his father across the stubble of a hayfield:

the slap in our gloves like the sound

of punching an ornery cow

Mr. Kinsey turns the surprise around in one of his new poems, “Army Worms.” As they eat their way across a crop of rowen, he writes, the worms sound like horses eating hay:

or like the rub of taffeta against my leg

at prom balls in my earlier life.

There is a great deal of loss in the work of Leland Kinsey. He writes, in “Last Crops,” of the family gathering to harvest the fruits and vegetables husbanded by his sister Helen, who has died of cancer.

And in “Picking Stone” the family comes to the aid of a cousin, Jeff Kinsey, who is too weakened by the cancer that is killing him to do the job himself.

Jeff is given the last word:

“Well, I know you must love me,

I never thought I’d see you pick stone again.”

Little enough burden.

The book is bracketed by poems about the poet’s father, Fred Kinsey. There’s bitterness in the final poem, an angry homage to an unstoppable force who lay dying in hospital:

You worked your life in the Northeast Kingdom

with power,

and no glory,

ever.

And there’s great joy in the new work that opens the book, “The Skinny.” A young Fred and his brother Bob are caught skinny dipping in the Barton River as a train pulls by carrying the King and Queen of England on a royal visit.

… they stood and waved

and thought or pretended the Queen responded,

at a window the sweep of a hand

a pleasant face

moving away at considerable speed.

There is in fact a map of Mr. Kinsey’s world. Shown to him recently by his mother, Louise Kinsey, it shows the road from the family farm to South Albany, past Hartwell Pond where a car is parked. In the pond, the tiny bobbing heads of the Kinseys, reaping their cool reward for a hot day spent in the hayfield. If a child spent too much time out of sight, a parent would call out and wait for the answering “Here I am.”

When he drew the map, at age six, Mr. Kinsey could not have known it would illustrate one of his poems, “Swimming Late.” In it, this master of brilliant closing lines that can cast deep shadows across what seemed a simple narrative, remembers such a night at Hartwell:

Tonight, after a long hot day

I’ve worked through, I say softly

“Here I am.”

to no one’s call,

to no one expecting an answer

After another long hot day, in “Double Digging the Garden,” Mr. Kinsey reflects that he grows more food than he and his wife can eat, more than they can give away:

I could join the farmer’s market

but don’t like meeting new people.

My legacy may consist of refuse.

But then comes my favorite conclusion of all the poems in Galvanized. He’s writing about his garden, but the lines serve as a metaphor for Mr. Kinsey’s real legacy:

Here is life’s habit on grand exhibit

and the hard work hidden.

Editor’s note: Leland Kinsey will read selections from Galvanized at Green Mountain Books in Lyndonville on March 25 at 3 p.m.; at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick on April 5 at 7 p.m.; and at an Osher talk and reading at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury on May 5 at 1:30 p.m. The book’s official publication date is April 8.

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BARTON – Barton Village is a little big bigger than it was before its annual meeting Tuesday night. By a vote of 23 to 1 residents voted to incorporate a small piece of land near the intersection of Route 16 and the Roaring Brook Road into the village.

The adjustment to the village charter was decided by Australian ballot and must still be ratified by the Legislature before it becomes final, but it is one of the final steps before the old Roaring Brook Road bridge is replaced with a new span.

Voters also elected Cathy Swain, a new resident to the village, to fill the seat vacated by Trustee Ryan Longe. Mr. Longe, who…To read the rest of this article, and all the Chronicle‘s stories, subscribe:

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There will be contested races for selectmen in Derby and Brighton. The big news, though, is that the four towns that choose officers by Australian ballot will have candidates for all major offices.

In Barton, which has two open seats on the board of selectmen, Elizabeth McCartney will stand to replace Jim Greenwood, who decided…To read the rest of this article, and all the Chronicle‘s stories, subscribe:

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The long-awaited fish passage at Barton Electric’s hydroelectric power plant in West Charleston officially opened on December 23. Federal regulations require a way for fish to be able to migrate upstream past a power plant or dam….

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Ione Armstrong’s beauty shop in Barton will close on December 23. She opened the shop on a shoestring 36 years ago, building the stations in her shop herself out of old kitchen cabinets. Photo by Elizabeth Trail

copyright the Chronicle December 16, 2015

by Elizabeth Trail

BARTON — A Barton landmark will close for good on December 23.

Ione’s Beauty Shop has been a fixture on Church Street, between the library and what is now Ming’s restaurant, for 36 years. But 75-year-old Ione Armstrong is making plans to retire just before Christmas.

Ms. Armstrong is looking forward to having more time to spend with her longtime partner, Douglas Bowen. The two have lived together for 26 years. And for most of those years she was running not just the shop in Barton, but also a second shop in Albany.

“He wanted me to get done so we’d have more time together. All this time, he’s never complained.”

Born near Ausable Forks, New York,… To read the rest of this article, and all the Chronicle‘s stories, subscribe: